Street Smarts: Adam Platinga

Cop shares his street smarts in new book

By Jessica Zack

S.F. police Sgt. Adam Plantinga’s book reads like advice he’d give to a rookie cop, tinged with a street-smart wariness.

San Francisco police Sgt. Adam Plantinga admits that he has “occasionally, and never too proudly, found myself yelling at the television” when Hollywood cops are shown doing things — like telling a gunman more than once to drop his weapon, or shooting at an oncoming suspect’s car — that fly in the face of “good, common-sense policing.”

Another one of Plantinga’s pet peeves? “In the movies, even the slightest cop knocks down a door in one kick. Real life is different. Once it took me 27 tries. I know this because there was a sergeant next to me counting out loud encouragingly,” Plantinga, 41, writes in his riveting and often humorous new book “400 Things Cops Know: Street-Smart Lessons From a Veteran Patrolman.”

An unusually frank insider’s view of what Plantinga calls “simply one of the most engrossing professions around,” “400 Things” is a personal compendium of both hard-won sociological insights and offbeat anecdotes compiled during his 13 years wearing the badge.

“I’ve always tried to be a good student of the game, so I’ve been scribbling notes and observations on tactics, techniques, anything I found particularly striking, for years,” Plantinga, 41, who lives in Lamorinda with his wife and two daughters, said during a recent interview about the recent flood of positive attention he’s been receiving for a book that not so long ago he doubted would ever be published.

After deciding four years ago to shape his wide-ranging reflections on everything from traffic stops to criminal profiling into a manuscript, Plantinga was ignored or sent rejections by 90 literary agents. “The 91st did his due diligence but couldn’t quite make a (publishing) deal happen,” he says, “but I always thought I had something here so I kept plugging away.”

Boost from authors

When the small Fresno indie press Quill Driver Books signed the title, Plantinga took the publisher’s suggestion to send the book to his “dream list” of favorite writers. “I just cold e-mailed them — George Pelecanos, Lee Child, Ed Conlon, whose 'Blue Blood’ sparked my own interest in writing the book.”

Within weeks of its October release, “400 Things” was generating social-media buzz. Pelecanos recommended the book on Twitter as “essential for crime writers” aiming for veracity in their story lines “and anyone interested in the reality of police work.” “400 Things” is currently the No.1 best-seller among Amazon’s law enforcement titles.

Child, bestselling author of the Jack Reacher novels, has been citing “400 Things” as his favorite read of 2014. “I thought I’d just glance at the first few pages then set it aside, but two hours later I’d finished the whole thing,” Child said by phone from New York. “It’s a list but reads as a hypnotic, stylish memoir. I hope Adam writes a novel one day.”

“I feel like I’ve been transported to an alternate universe,” says Plantinga, a down-to-earth native of Grand Rapids, Mich. “I was a preacher’s kid. I stayed out of trouble, but I always had this childlike desire to get out there and catch bad guys. I think there’s some small part of me where that’s still the case.”

Plantinga says his parents “really emphasized service in our household.” After graduating from Marquette University, Plantinga spent a year in the Jesuit Volunteer Corps working at a shelter for homeless teens in Houston. “But I still found I had that pull to be a cop.”

He spent seven years as a patrol officer in Milwaukee before moving to the Bay Area in 2008. Plantinga has worked out of San Francisco’s Bayview and Southern (SoMa) stations, and joined Mission Station a month ago as a new sergeant on the felony investigations team.

Although big-city policing has a great deal in common among jurisdictions, Plantinga says “there is definitely more pushback from citizens” in San Francisco, a city with a long history of questioning authority.

“That’s OK. I’m all for people going out and taking a stand on a cause,” he says during the same week as confrontational protests around the bay following the grand jury decisions in the Michael Brown and Eric Garner cases. “People want to know why we’re doing things and we should be in a position to answer.”

He writes affectingly in “400 Things” about split-second “Shoot or Don’t Shoot” scenarios. “Use of force is tricky because there is no perfect calculus to decide how much to use,” he says. “You want to use the minimum force necessary to control a situation, yet you’re trained that almost everyone you encounter is potentially dangerous,” he says, adding that “anyone who fights with the police is making a very bad decision.”

Plantinga’s book is a corrective to “the glitzy, glamorous Hollywood cop shows,” but also a snapshot of his own views on such thorny subjects as gun control, broken families and criminal profiling.

“As a street cop, one of your major goals is to prevent violent crime and take felons into custody, but they don’t come to you. You have to go out and find them, and one way is stopping people for minor violations — littering, riding a bicycle on the sidewalk. Then you can ID them.

“That being said, there’s still a right way and wrong way to go about it. We shouldn’t assume everyone out there is John Dillinger. There has to be a civil conversation, and we probably don’t do that enough.”

Troubling insights

Among Plantinga’s troubling insights is “the irony that the people who live in the kinds of neighborhoods that need you the most also hate you the most.”

He says that’s “one of the hardest parts of the job” and can erode a police officer’s sense of optimism. “There’s this 90/10 rule. Ninety percent of people are decent in ways that count. 10 percent not so much. And as a cop you deal with that 10 percent 90 percent of the time. That’s a big problem because it starts to color your world view, and if you’re not careful you fall into this trap of thinking everyone out there is a felon. That’s why it’s important to have a life outside the job. Family. Friends. Time with healthy, well-adjusted people.”

Many of Plantinga’s life lessons read as the advice he’d give to a rookie cop, tinged with a street-smart wariness: If you’re in a restaurant on duty, don’t leave your food or drink unattended (someone could spit in it or drug you). Write your blood type on your ballistic vest in large print. Anything that weighs two pounds or more can hurt you. Never park your squad car right in front of the address you’re sent to (known as the “kill zone”).

Plantinga, like his new book, is an unusual hybrid — the die-hard public servant who has lofty ideals about fighting crime, and also the witty English major who relishes recounting the humorous absurdities of life on patrol: People showing up at the door unclothed. A man who asks to go in and use the ATM during an active bank robbery. Citizens who call 911 because their neighbor gave them a dirty look.

“One of my favorites? Criminals who somehow, even after violent felonies, leave their ID at the scene. Otherwise there would be no way to connect them to the crime, but they basically solve it for us. I always marvel, how can that possibly be? You guys have to tighten your game up a little bit.”